Our small, not particularly shaded ranch house got through the summer of 2026, even the notorious “heat dome” of July, without an ounce of air-conditioning.
No window unit slammed into place, as my now city-dwelling son used to insist on for the rear family room. No standing unit brought up from the basement to rumblingly blow its exhaust out an accordion tube jury-rigged where a bedroom window screen should be.
European-style. Although I hear our former allies are having second thoughts about that.
Aretha Franklin-style, maybe that’s preferable, the Queen of Soul famously eschewing canned air to be with the people in their stifling experience of the natural world.
The avoidance of that yearly spike in the electric bill is of course a plus, as it’s puzzlingly sky-high as it is. The only point to be added there, not to give succor to the enemy, is the stability. Here in Noyac, we’ve lost power for all of 20 minutes in the last 14 years.
That’s probably a foolhardy statement to make as hurricane season nears its height, but power outages used to be a regular, at times protracted, feature of summer life here. At least in the old farmhouse our family rented in Bridgehampton, mid-1970s to mid-1980s, its windows set just loosely enough for maximum rattling during your average passing thunderstorm.
With the state of the world as it is, getting by with less has been top of mind lately — waste, water, wasting water, you name it. Our lawn is as lush as a Middle Eastern carpet through sheer benign neglect. I don’t know about the neighbors, but the critters seem to appreciate the once-a-month mowing schedule, too.
In the early 1990s, the Environmental House at Beloit College promoted fliers for residence hall bathrooms, urging, “If it’s brown, it goes down. Yellow, let it mellow.”
Point memorably taken. This outsider of a transfer student, however, couldn’t help but scrawl an accompanying Robert Crumb enhancement: “Tommy Toilet sez: Don’t forget to wipe your ass, folks!” (Even if I couldn’t begin to replicate the original’s cartoon speaker, a smiling pile of anthropomorphized porcelain.)
It wasn’t much later that I found myself kicking back in a $300-a-month cabin in the interior of Alaska, the ne plus ultra of simple living. Hauling water jugs from a nozzle set up for public use at a rushing stream. Heating up water on the stovetop for doing dishes or bodily washing and draining it into a slop bucket, augmented by occasional showers at work, if you were lucky, or for a nominal fee at the laundromat in downtown Fairbanks.
Trips to the outhouse.
About which, it has to be said, my hole in the ground didn’t even stink that bad. Or maybe that’s just me.